The Condition of Postmodernity

This etching with aquatint print is part of the famine aspect in the series "The Four." While the vast majority of civilization's existence is filled with the suffering of the poor; a post industrial, post modern world has no reason to have even one hungry person. The gap between those lowest and highest in the economic spectrum is greater than at any point in human history. This is further exacerbated by the burden on the middle class which is forced to support both ends because of deception and greed of the rich. In the process those who are in the moral position to alleviate the pain on the poor are relegated to ignoring and avoiding them. I accuse myself as well of this hypocracy.

Multiple point of view

The use of reflective surfaces in still life, interior space, figure and portrait work allow the artist to tackle the object from multiple points of view simultaneously. It is a good method to understand the relationships in space and how light interacts with that void. Mirrors create interesting compositional elements and can give a seemingly mundane study an intriguing narrative. This charcoal study has given me insight for a future piece that I will call "Janet's Nemesis."

Kierkegaard’s Dilemma

This image is an etching from the disease aspect of the series The Four. While doctors take an oath to do no harm, they are inevitably corrupted by the constraints of capitalism that dictate medical care. As an individual patient, one does not exist nor have a personal nor profound purpose, but simply acts as a vessel for data to be harvested from. Physicians have the deepest desire to heal, but their spirits are broken and thus they lose their humanity. Ultimately the patient pays the price, especially those without adequate financial resources to accommodate the care they truly require.

Multiple portraiture

These two portrait studies are of the same model using different medium and technique. The ink on bristol was drawn while situated under the model looking upward. It created a strange angle that distorts the face and elongates the lower half of the face. The charcoal study was drawn opposite handed which I am increasingly getting accustomed and finding interesting results with each study.

Clayboard aka Scratchboard

There is a very unique feel to using scratchboard, and the results of white line on black background force the artist to think of form and negative space without color in mind, almost like a value study in reverse. There are many effects that can be done using a variety of scratching tools and further use of paint or stain can bring the finished piece to vibrant conclusion.

Drawing opposite handed

I am right -handed and this portrait study of Anna was drawn entirely left-handed. It is extremely difficult to draw opposite handed and also a very awkward experience as if though you are not in control of your limb. However, learning to work opposite handed is a valuable ability as it allows you to approach things from multiple ways. Leonardo DaVinci could draw profficiently with both hands and it is theorized that having that ability allowed him to access both hemispheres of his brain simultaneously, thus explaining his ingenuity and innovation.

Drawing from a dark background

It is very difficult to work from dark to light. For this study, I wanted to see if I could apply color on black paper to create all the warmth and light on the figure without having to worry about the dark values. The difficulty with drawing though, is that you are limited in the value range you can achieve and can easily over saturate certain colors making them too intense. Notice the eyes, once light is added it becomes difficult to darken them again. Especially in this medium, as colored pencils do not leave much room for correction. This is an important excersise that all artists must attempt as it helps understanding values and temperature when you are working in reverse. Caravaggio was the master at bringing lights our from a dark background, and his work pops off the canvas.

Ink Drawing on Bristol

Like silverpoint, drawing in ink forces the artist to make confident marks as there is minimal correction that can be done. The better quality pen that is used, the better the results. Using pens of various diameters (0.1 mm, 0.3 mm, 0.5 mm, 0.7mm 1.0mm) allows the artist a wide range of marks and line widths. There are many ways to approach a subject with ink, including contour, stipling, cross hatching, blocking, sketching or any combination of the various styles. Bristol is an excellent paper for ink as it it smooth, accepts the flow of the ink consistantly and has a brilliant white surface which helps define the line. For precision work an artist should ideally use repitographs, but those take practice to master as the point needs to "float" above the surface and not press into the paper like a typical pen. Many artists have managed to get remarkable results from cheap disposable roller ball pens. However, you will never find a true black with any inexpensive equipment.

Beta Eruption

This linocut print is the second image of the Eruption aspect in the Distaster series. Carving in linolium block produces such a distinct feel that is worlds apart from the birch woodblocks. They are both extremely expressive mediums to work with, but every particular image is puncuated by the material that is used. In this case, I feel that the always shifting earth is a fluid thing and the smoothness of the lino allows that dynamic to show.

Beta Conflagration

This multiple color woodblock print is the second image in the Conflagration aspect of the Disaster Series. This image depicts the overwhelming destruction that takes place from the great wildfires. While a naturally occuring and necessary phenomenon, the intrution of man into the cycle has caused devestation far beyond what nature had ever intended. The continual wildfires in the western states and the recent uncontrollable infernos in Russia and Greece a few years past reminds us that there is truly no escape from the firestorm. 

The Dying Gaul

The image of the dying warrior is a classical motif that has been revisited countless times in art history, each time taking on a new meaning. During the Renaissance, the pose was typically reserved for the Passion of Christ or the Martydom of the Apostles. In Napoleanic times, David painted  "Death of Marat" as a variation on that theme and pose but used for political propaganda. For this, DaLawn reclined in a casual dying pose so that there was adequate anatomy showing. In addition to the vine charcoal, I attempted a scratchboard to approximate a silverpoint as well as an ink on bristol drawing.

Alpha Gale

This print is first image of  "Gale" within the disaster series. As with "Deluge," "Conflagration," and "Eruption," this "Alpha" is an etching with aquatint. Being lost in the wind is a harsh thing to imagine as it attacks multiple senses and leaves you completely discombobulated. However, the wind is the easiest disaster to escape if you have adequate shelter.

Reclining Nude

One of the standard historical art poses is the reclining female nude. This type of pose has been used widely since the Renaissance to illustrate classical Greek stories, reimagined in the Colonial 19th century with the facination of the Orient as depicted with the Odalisque, and brought through the modern era with the engagment of the viewer by examining the female form and identity and the political and socialogical struggle that it was coupled with. The above two studies of Janet and Anna are just a few of the many reclining nudes an artist will have to do before he can master the female form. Keep in mind that one needs a full range of ethnicities, skin tones and body types to truly understand all the subtle charateristics of the anatomy.

Inspired Art

There is an organization called America Scores that works hard to provide after school activities for disadvantaged youth in urban communities. They offer sports such as soccer and creative activities like writing and play acting. I am humbly participating in their Inspired Art fundraising initiative in which artists create a work of art that is based on a poem of one of the children in the program. An artist always finds inspiration from a great many sources and illustrating prose is an excellent way to master mood and emotional resonance. This piece is titled "No one is there to tell her everything is ok." It is a multiple color woodblock print. I carved into birch panel and used water based inks on very fine paper. The poem is from an 11 year old girl and is as follows:

LONLINESS

This girl sits in the corner and cry alone

With no one by her side as sad as she is

She feels like garbage with everyone against her

While she stays everyday with no one there
To tell her everything will be ok
She feels like her family regrets her being born
She hates the fact that she has to feel this way
And she feels like a big disgrace.



If you are interested in helping America Scores please visit their blog: http://americascoreschicago.blogspot.com/

Alpha Conflagration

This print was done with etching with aquatint and is part of the disaster series. One can find shelter from the wind, rising waters and moving earth, but the raging inferno is impossable to avoid. This image has been in my mind since I was a young man and first read about the fire bombing of Dresden by allied forces towards the end of the second World War. Fire is all consuming and nature's ultimate destroyer.

Anatomical Detail Studies

Understanding the individual elements that make up the human body is crucial to learning the anatomy as a whole. Making studies of the various components such as hands, lips, eyes, ears, back, shoulders, ribcage, feet, etc. gives the artists an allowance to best fit them all together when working on the entire human body. The two silverpoints above are short, 2 hours studies from a live model which I always find better to use than plaster casts.

Back Studies

It goes without saying that the hands and feet are the most difficult parts of the human anatomy to capture perfectly, followed of course by the face. The one part of the anatomy that is often overlooked is the back. There are so many subtle variances in the structures of the scapula, ribs and spine as well as all the muscle groups making the back frustrating to get right. Above are partial back studies of Tiffany focusing on the scapula. The vine charcoal allowed me to focus on the movement of the torso while the silverpoint focused on the projecting surfaces.

Deluge series Alpha & Beta

Here are the final versions of Alpha Deluge (etching) and Beta Deluge (linocut). I am thrilled with the results and look forward to experimenting with the additional media for this series. I have expanded the project to include 4 different series of 24 images in 24 different media.

Silverpoint II

This Silverpoint of DeLawn was completed in a single, 4 hour session. The immediacy of the medium forces the artist to make bold and decisive marks as there is no erasure and absolute minimal correction that can be done. I find that the more silverpoint I do, the tighter my drafstmanship becomes. It's no wonder the masters used this technique, it forces you to become better.

Head Studies

There is an unfortunate lack of anatomical mastery in art education in the USA. I am collateral damage of the post modern era where concept and expression took precedent over academic style teaching methods. For that reason, I am constantly struggling to perform that which, at this point in my career, should be second nature. I can not stress enough how critical it is for the artist to continously sharpen their ability to draw and paint the human body, especially the hands and face. That is why so many self-portraits exist of the great masters; understanding the one face you never see, save in reflection, is the best way to master the structure of the face. Here are two charcoal head studies of Vikki & Jerry. Ideally, one head study per week is the way to go.

After Rodin's Thinker

For this piece I decided to replicate the pose of Rodin's sculpture "The Thinker." Using historical art as a springboard for one's work is a perfectly acceptable way to master certain techniques. In fact, there is ample precedent in which artists borrow style, image and composition from other artists. This is because all visual arts, just like music and language, are governed by rules of grammar and vocabulary, how the artist composes the final sentence and paragraph is what makes the work unique.

The Lotus

This was a very interesting pose to work on as the subtle variences of the anatomy of the back were difficult to bring out. I feel that I need to revisit this pose in the future with a different lighting scheme (as she was lit from a frontal angle). Nonetheless, I am still satisfied with the outcome.

Political Imagry

This piece is titled: "His throat was parched." It is a woodblock print using birch, which has the consistent surface of oak and the ease of carving of pine.

The image presented is meant to invoke the sacrifice and pain that individuals have thoroughout history taken in defense of family/home/nation. Not only the dying man, but his wife who is as valiant and noble, if not more, than her husband. She is brave and stoic as she is trying to alleviate her husband's discomfort, but there will never be any solace for her. Millions have died and continue to die in gross abuses of human rights and flagrant violations of common decency. So many lives ruined with not one iota of solace for those left behind.

Foreshortening

One can easily overlook certain elements that can become big obstacles to getting the drawing right. Perspective, foreshortening, value range, proportion, etc. are all critical in making a successful piece. I began the drawing of Vikki in graphite by mapping out volumes/shapes and building up from there. Half way through I realized that I had not captured the pose correctly as I elongated the legs to make up for foreshortening, an easy thing to miss. I corrected that in the second drawing using vine charcoal and the very methodical optical reduction method which fixed the drawing and made the pose stand out much more. The highlights were achieved with white pastel.

Sculpture from drawing to maquette to 1up

For this pose, Mason had to find a comfortable postion and stay nearly still as any slouching, change in angle or sagging would alter the entire anatomy. I started with a series of drawings from various points of view, then created a rough maquette with Roma Plastilina. The final sculpt began with a heavy gauge (6) aluminum wire acting as an armature on which the plastilina is built on. The scale is 3 inches per foot. I choose to leave the surface rough with my finger indentations visible so that I can have the worked in look of a Rodin, who is my favorite sculptor in all of art history. When I have finished touching up the detail, I will have to find a way to create an easy to assemble series of molds which will allow me to make wax positives that I can make bronze casts out of.

Importance of drawing to painting

This is a work in progress of Tiffany at the Sewing Machine. It is a 36" X 48" oil on canvas. Due to my zeal to finish the piece completely with the model, I rushed through the drawing and the underpainting, making the actual painting substantially more difficult. I spent more time correcting the drawing errors, thus negating all my intentions. It is critical to take the time in the beginning to make sure that everything is in order before you continue. Taking the right steps at the right time relieves much of the tension and anxiety to painting. I managed to save the piece and recover its direction, but it will now take me longer and it still did will not be right.

Deluge Series

These are two proofs of work in progress. The pieces are part of a series titled "Deluge." By repeating certain motifs in both the linocut and the etching I am allowed the opportunity to examine the same image in different ways. This actually helps develop the compositions by learning from each style and incorporating that insight into future interations or revisions of the work. The plan is to explore the theme in 7 different media; etching, linocut, b&w graphite drawing, oil painting, watercolor, pastel and bronze cast relief.

Sitting Pose

This is a work in progress of Ashley in a sitting pose. The piece is a 30" x 40" oil on canvas. I prefer close cropped compositions as they bring the viewer in and allow a shared intamacy with the image. The set was lit with full spectrum daylight bulbs on one side and an incandecent lamp on the other. This brings forth an ample range of cool and warm tones on Ashley's skin and creates an interesting tension between inside/outside. I have employed the dead palette which limits the pigments to Yellow Ochre, Transparent Yellow Lake, Raw Sienna, Raw Umber, Mars Violet Deep, English Red, Alizarin Crimson, Titanium White, Mars Black & Blue Black.

Various Studies

In order to best determine how to approach an image, artists typically make several sketches and studies and then proceed to work with a choice of medium for the final piece. With this particular composition, I chose a pose with classical precedent and tried multiple studies from various angles in different media. The top most is an ala prima oil study on canvas board, the middle a vine charcoal on paper and the last a silver point. I was dissastisfied with all three, and decided to scrap a final piece, but the excersise gave me insight which will help with this pose in the future.

Rock Temple Beach

There is a rocky beach on the eastern shore of Mackinac Island facing Lake Huron where there are erected thousands of sculptures made of stacked rocks. Someone started this trend a decade ago and it has attracted visitors to stop and construct their own. This is temporary art that is natural and geographically specific. Each piece acts as a unique installation that is part of a greater whole. The beach is organic and alive and is meant to elicit a response from the viewer who also acts as the participant in its creation, upkeep and evolution. There is a spiritual element in building a sculpture from found objects that creates a dialogue between the man made and the natural. This is my sculpture, I do not expect it to remain there long, for the elements will undoubtedly knock it down, but on my return trip, I shall build another.

Art Essay - Jay Scott Morgan - The Mystery of Goya's Saturn

Here is a prime example of a extremely well written art essay. It was written by Jay Scott Morgan for the New England Review. The essay, titled "The Mystery of Goya's Saturn", is about one viewer's obsession, revulsion, adulation and understanding for Francisco Goya's painting: Saturn Devouring One of His Sons. This is one of my favorite historical paintings and Morgan's eloquent essay does it great justice and expresses my thoughts as well. -F

The image is ineffaceable: the cannibal god on bended knees, engulfed in darkness; the mad haunted eyes and black-blooded mouth; the rending fingers, threaded with blood, and the ravaged figure in their grasp--a work of such indelible power, it seems to have existed before it was created, like some deep-rooted, banished memory, inescapable as nightmare.

It is the painting known as Saturn Devouring One of His Sons, by Francisco Goya, an image that has been imprinted on my psyche since I first viewed it in college, in 1969. Critics have called his Saturn a symbol of evil, a Satan, a monster, and that is how I first saw him--like a huge, mad Richard Nixon, devouring the young men of America through the Vietnam War: a cannibal father, jealous of our freedoms, determined to destroy us, our ideals, our hopes.

Thirty years later, the painting still evokes in me an interior terror, a sense of isolation, loneliness, grief--this god on his knees, tearing apart his own child, enshrouded in a blackness that is like a psychic tar, clinging to me, clinging me to him, to a drama of primal murderousness, so that now I seem to be participant as well as viewer. I look upon him, and I am implicated in the crime.

This story of fathers and sons is one of the foundation tales of Western tradition: Abraham binding his son Isaac for sacrifice on Mount Moriah; God offering the sacrifice of His son Jesus on the cross. The earliest version of the Kronos myth--Saturn is the later Roman name--was written down by Hesiod in his Theogony, around the eighth century, B.C.E.

First comes Chaos; then Earth/Gaia; Tartarus in the bowels of Earth; and finally Eros. Earth gives birth to Heaven, also known as Ouranos, and then bears twelve of his children, the last, "most terrible of sons/The crooked-scheming Kronos."* Earth and Ouranos have three more sons, so fearsome and mighty that Ouranos forces them back inside their mother, burying them alive. She forms a sickle, and asks her other sons to use it against their father, "For it was he/Who first began devising shameful acts." All are afraid, except Kronos. She gives him the sickle, hides him in her, and he castrates his father, preventing him from having more children, then assumes power among the Titans. But fear lives in his heart; a usurper himself, he learns that one of his own children will usurp him, and he devours them at birth:

As each child issued from the holy womb

And lay upon its mother's knees, each one

Was seized by mighty Kronos, and gulped down.

Through a ruse by his mother, the last born, Zeus, survives, leads a war against Kronos, and casts him down to Tartarus. Even gods cannot overcome Fate.

Goya produced a chalk drawing, Saturn Devouring His Sons, in 1796-97, most likely influenced by a Rubens painting of the same subject in Madrid's Royal Collection. Both works are illustrative of a literary theme, passionless, even morbidly comic. Rubens's Saturn is out on a stroll, his foot resting momentarily on a stone, one hand holding his staff, the other grasping his meal--his infant son--biting into the boy's chest like "a sturdy Flemish burgher stooping to a roast goose," to quote Wyndham Lewis. Goya's Titan is cunning-eyed; his mouth, clamped upon his son's leg to the thigh, is turned upwards in a leering grin; the legs of a second son he holds almost daintily, his pinky slightly raised. Neither work is likely to evoke more than a passing grimace from a viewer.

All of this changes with the Saturn of 1820-24, one of the series known as the Black Paintings. What returned Goya to this subject? What did he recognize in himself that charged the work with such raw, wounding power?

Goya and his wife, Josefa, had numerous children--between five and twenty: the exact number is unknown. Only one boy, Javier, survived beyond childhood. In Goya's letters to Martin Zapater, his friend from their school days in Saragossa, he often comments on Josefa's pregnancies, her illnesses, her many miscarriages.

My own wife had two miscarriages, one early in her pregnancy, the other at five months. She was forced to birth the second one--a boy--through induced labor, and the sight of his stringy, blood-marked fetus tormented me, as if some unspeakable, monstrous demon had entered her womb, and fed itself on his immeasurably vulnerable life.

I wonder: did the early deaths of his other children, reflected upon in the solitude of the Quinta del Sordo--the house he moved into in 1819, seven years after Josefa died--inspire Goya's vision of the cannibal god? Was he portraying his sense of potential cut off, of lives interrupted before they can begin?

Even as I suggest this possible interpretation, inconsistencies within the painting call it into question. The figure gripped in the giant's hands is no child, but a full grown adult, which leads to another, allied interpretation: Saturn/Kronos as the ancient deity Time, implacable devourer of all humankind.

Shortly before he began the Black Paintings, Goya survived a near fatal illness, documented in his Self-portrait with Dr. Arrieta, where the pained and weary artist, surrounded by dark, phantasmal faces, is ministered to by the doctor.

Did Goya, sick, deaf, in his seventies, paint his lonely terror of his own mortality through his Saturn?

But if the giant represents Time, why is he painted on bended knees, with spindly misshapen legs that seem unable to bear the weight of his enormous torso? Is this Goya's sardonic commentary on Spain's recent war with France--presenting a crippled Time, forced to overfeed on the numberless dead? On the dead of all wars? Did the early nineteenth century supply Saturn/Kronos with such quantities of corpses, that Time himself is brought to his knees, his wild eyes bulging, as if he were unable to stomach another bite? Or is the figure a symbol of war itself, the culminating portrait of the horrors he chronicled in his series of etchings, The Disasters of War, in 1810-1820?

Every interpretation of a painting rooted so complexly in the mind of Goya leads, as with dreams, to new interpretations.

In the universe before the coming of Christ, Saturn, frenziedly eating his own child-god, might be seen as engaged in an act of perverse communion. The Christian God sacrificed his son that all humankind might live; the Titan acts out of fear and jealousy, and the body of his child reveals not the mystery of resurrection, but the dark and violent mysteries of the psyche, a Tartarus of blood and madness, where all instincts and emotions merge, and consequence is forgotten. A realm of unconsciousness. Of mutilation and murder.

From this perspective, Saturn might be Goya's warning to humankind, whose wars and wanton cruelties, devotion to superstition and false gods will lead it to dissolution, to the Nada scrawled by the corpse as its last message in the etching, "Nothing. We shall see." (The Disasters of War #69)

And yet, for all the mythological, political, social, historical, and religious meanings we attach to the painting, there is something we still turn away from, the most basic theme--a man destroying his own son.

I think again of Javier, Goya's only child to survive to adulthood.

From the beginning, Goya loved him, pampered him, fretted over him.
"I have a son of four who is so beautiful that people look at him in the street in Madrid. He has been so ill that I haven't lived for all the period of his sickness. Thanks be to God he is now better," he wrote to Zapater, in 1789.

Fathers and sons enjoy, or are condemned to, the play of uniquely powerful forces of love and pride, disappointment and dominance, the scales forever unbalanced, sometimes seeming to shift in a single moment, then swaying back. Communications, in the best of circumstances, are infinitely complicated (I know; I have an eighteen-year-old son myself) and the effects of Goya's deafness should not be underestimated. It developed in 1793, when Javier was nine, and the use of sign language must have impeded dialogue. What remained unsaid between them? We subtly shade our speech through inflection, expecting understanding. Did Javier feel Goya's eyes always on him--as father, as deaf man, as artist--studying his face for clues to his thoughts?

Families are not spiritualized entities--they are cauldrons of emotional drama. The relations between family members are always mysterious, affected by currents never truly understood by outsiders. We can only speculate here, knowing the intricacies within our own families.

Goya had hopes that Javier would follow in his footsteps and devote himself to art. In 1803, he presented the plates and the remaining sets of his Caprichos to Charles IV, asking, as he writes in a letter to Cayetano Soler, for "some recompense for my son Francisco Javier Goya so that he may be able to travel; he has the inclination and a great disposition to improve himself." Later, he expressed to Soler his satisfaction for "the pension of twelve thousand reales that his majesty has conceded my son."

In 1805, Javier married the daughter of a respected, wealthy family from Saragossa. Goya undertook, in the marriage contract, to be financially responsible for the couple, their servants, any children they might have. In his later years, it was said that he had spent most of his wealth on his only child and his daughter-in-law, leaving little for himself.

Soon after the marriage, Goya painted a portrait of the twenty-one-year-old Javier. Despite his love and pride, he is an artist, and cannot help but render what he sees: a handsome, foppish, self-regarding young man with a somewhat weak chin, seeming to lacking the depth of character necessary to create great art.

At what age did Javier realize that he would never fulfill his father's ambitions for him?

Seven years later, as the war against Napoleon's armies was ending, Josefa died. Javier claimed his mother's inheritance, and when the property was divided, Goya gave to his son the house, library, and, curiously, nearly all his own art work in a collection of seventy-eight paintings and prints, like a man making restitution for genius denied in the blood. He kept for himself only two portraits: the bullfighter Romero, and the Duchess of Alba, the celebrated beauty he had followed to Andalusia in 1795, after she was widowed, and had lived with for almost a year, while Josefa and the twelve-year-old Javier remained in Madrid. In her will, signed during Goya's stay, the Duchess bequeathed a lifetime annuity for Javier.

In 1819, Goya retreated across the Manzanares River on the outskirts of Madrid to his villa, known coincidentally as the Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man. He had already achieved the pre-eminent position of First Painter of the Royal Bedchamber, and was the most famous artist in Spain; survived war, pestilence, famine, a near-fatal illness; endured the deaths of so many loved ones. Surely he had earned, at seventy-three, an existence free of turmoil in the peace of the Quinta, if he so wished. Quickly, he filled the walls with vivid landscapes in lush greens and sky blues; mountains, rivers, donkeys, small figures; even a man dancing with castanets--all revealed in recent years through radiography and stratigraphy.

Then, something happens.

Goya suddenly unleashes his art, covering over the colorful landscapes, refusing himself the bland pleasures of the merely picturesque, recognizing in every surface a new opportunity, until the Quinta mirrors his internal world, the meanings personal, all sense of decoration dismissed. Only truth remains. On the dining room wall, two-and-a half feet by four-and-a-half feet, a thick-shouldered, murderous colossus begins to take shape. If he once exposed his son's nature in a portrait, he now strips himself bare with his Saturn.

One more time, we look at the painting.

Cover the right side of the face, and we see a Titan caught in the act, defying anyone to stop him, the bulging left eye staring wildly at some unseen witness to his savagery, his piratical coarseness heightened by the sharp vertical lines of the eyebrow, crossed like the stitches of a scar. Cover his left eye, and we are confronted by a being in pain, the dark pupil gazing down in horror at his own uncontrolled murderousness, the eyebrow curved upwards like an inverted question mark, as if he were asking, "Why am I compelled to do this?"

As an eighteen-year-old, I once saw, with revulsion, only the image of a gruesome giant, father as devourer. Thirty years later, I understand the hidden knowledge that evoked in Goya his terrible compassion for the cannibal god. The primal battle between fathers and sons is inescapable, the roots of such terrifying instincts too deep to be thoroughly excised. As fathers, we fear not only that we might destroy our sons--through anger, jealousy, fear; through our sometimes desperate love; through a thousand seemingly small sins--but that we secretly intend to destroy them. We want to protect them from the monsters that inhabit their nightmares, only to discover among the faces of those monsters our own.

Human beings are made free only by their admission of their darkest fears and impulses, and this admission, unalterably expressed, seems to have granted Goya a sense of well-being, as did the entire series of Black Paintings. Javier, writing after his father's death, "referred to the pleasure Goya had experienced in viewing daily in his house those pictures he had painted for himself with freedom and in accordance with his own genio."

The ancient myth that once provided him with the subject for an unmemorable drawing, becomes, in this late period of his life, the inspiration for uttering the unutterable. The irony would not, I believe, have been wasted on Goya: the very painting the world sees and shudders at--the image it considers one of the most horrifying in all Western art--had given its creator peace.

Illustration

This illustration was done for a client that wanted to portray its company and its industrial partners as loyal, trustworthy dogs holding their territory against their competitors who are portrayed as flea bitten hyenas, jackals and wild dogs. To create this illustration, I drew the dogs and the map of the US, then scanned them into my computer which allowed me to shift them around and change their values without having to redo the entire drawing every time. This method of illustration also allows changes to be made at the client's request without a major undertaking.

Still Life

Painting and drawing still life is also a very important exercise for artists. They are compact, can be set up just about anywhere in the studio and can linger for as long as the artist needs them. The still life helps the artist keep his arm and eye in shape. Just like a dancer or musician, without constant practice over time you get very rusty. These are a sampling of still life drawings and paintings.

Sketching

It goes wihtout saying that a sketchbook is an artist's main resource. It documents places, emotional response to events and builds a library of images that can be tapped for future use. It acts as a visual journal and data source. These are from a small collection of sketches.